The best of Public Access Vol.11: Welcome home
This week, there's plenty going on from hints on the upcoming Apple event to Instagram allowing users to upload both landscape and portrait-oriented photos, but the big news in Public Access is our shiny new home page! If you've been regularly reading these 'Best of' update posts, then you already knew that we've been busy working behind the scenes on sprucing up Public Access, but now it's finally here.
Here's a quick tour of all the changes: The new homepage is broken up into a few different sections with a Featured Story at the top highlighting a particularly well-written, timely or creative article. Below the Feature Story lives the Editor's Picks (chosen by yours truly) where roughly a dozen of your stories will be featured. You can still see all of the Public Access posts chronologically by clicking the "See all Public Access stories" link (which is to the right of the Editor's Picks heading).
Scrolling down you'll notice two new sections: User Reviews and This Week's Top 5. User Reviews are, naturally, culled from the reviews that users like you write and post on a product's review page. The articles that appear in the Top 5 represent the Public Access posts with the most page views -- congrats to those authors! And because we're overachievers, there's more on the way including tagging and a Q&A section with featured guests.
In the meantime, if you'd like to see all the Public Access posts in one place you can still do so here. If you'd like to contribute articles to Public Access, then mosey yourself on over here to sign up. Want to see your Public Access post appear on the new home page? We'll have more guidelines on that coming soon, too.
Recommended Reading
"My household had no gaming system until 1993 when we got an aging NES console that required a book to be wedged into the slot to keep the cartridge in the machine; we had no CD player until roughly 1995; and when I first moved to San Francisco to attend college, I had a hand-me-down beige desktop PC running Windows 98 and no cell phone to speak of. So how did I get to be a geek?"
Read the rest of Growing up geek: Not so much actually
"The app features a never ending database- some four million + items and a brilliant calorie counting feature. You can enter the types of food you are eating and sync it with your PC/ mobile device/tablet. There are exercise workouts which are varied and never boring, it keeps me motivated and has helped me make better eating choices. It has been extraordinarily transformative in many ways, I feel happier and healthier."
Read the rest of For your app-roval – Here are my Favorite Apps
"It is required that airport operations and processes have to be innovatively improved in order to ensure passengers' safety as well as the national security. In this case, biometric identification system scans travelers at the airports and matches their identities against the database of terrorists stored in their systems, thereby, identify possible attacks and mitigating the security risks."
Read the rest of Numerous Advantages of Biometric Physical Access Control
Your dose of inspiration
This week we want to know how you feel about the new Public Access homepage, in GIF form. Feel free to reply here in the comments, hit me up on Twitter (@Dameright), or contribute a post to Public Access with a GIF that describes how you feel about the new home page. Whether you like it, love it, or hate it with the fire of a thousand suns we want to know. Don't have any feelings one way or another? Then let us know what kinds of assignments and stories you'd most like to see appear on Public Access: More gaming? More science? More robots? Fewer Best of Posts? As ever, we want to hear from you.
